EVALUATIVE COMMENTARY

EXAM SCORES DOES NOT DETERMINE STUDENT’S PERFORMANCE

“Education is not the learning of facts; it’s rather the training of the mind to think.” – Albert Einstein

Students are often assessed whether by grades or test scores in school to track their performance and
progress in their studies so far. Those with good result are often evaluated as reputable students. On the
other hand, those with bad result are seen as a bummer. The question is, do exam scores really can
indicate student’s performance? The essays which we have examined bespeak on why exam scores does
not determine student’s performance. In my opinion, the authors were biased on their article as they
only discusses on the bad side of the issue. The points that prove this taboo topic is numerous which
include the way intelligent people are measured, and different indicators of achievement.

First of all, according to Tait (2015), measurement of highly intelligent people depends on how peculiar
the answers they are giving instead of using their own creativity whether by written or oral assessment.
Many turn a blind eye towards brilliant people as they thought that the meaning of intelligence is
connected with the abilities that have to be measured by examination. Because of this perspective,
many intellect ones were deprived and abandoned, also may produce many intelligent but uninventive
people (Tait, 2015). The randomness of our measurement can be identified by observing the wide
number of successful people who failed at school. We recompense ones that achieve success by
academic qualifications but not those who are a thinker, take risks for good and inventive people.

Besides that, student’s performance on test should not be used to evaluate educational quality due to
confounded causation. Student’s test score usually determined by how well the student did on the test
item. The problem of confounded causation involves three factors that contribute to student’s score on
their test which are things that taught in school, student’s native intellectual ability and a student’s out
of school learning. Most items in standardized test measure the knowledge and skills that student
discover in school. Human are born with different ability and intelligence. Some people are just lucky to
be born in a family with great educational background. Many educators suggest that there are various
form of intelligence, not just one (Gardner, 1994). A child may have fewer ability dealing with something
quantitative or verbal, but they may have better ‘interpersonal’ or ‘intrapersonal’ intelligence. However,
these kind of ability are not included in the school test.

Ultimately, O’Malley (2016) stated that grades and test scores measure different indicator of
assessments, attendance, homework and other in-class works. While standardized test scores are
usually designed to obtain a measure of student proficiency on a specified set of knowledge and skills
within a few academic areas. The biggest difference between class-based grading and standardized test
scoring are the scores from tests reflect student’s performance based on their result. On the other hand,
regarding grades, students can speak with teachers about grades to get a better sense of how and why
they earned the masks they did (O’Malley, 2016).

It might be concluded from this that

REFERENCES LIST :

https://education.cu-portland.edu/blog/news/do-standardized-test-show-an-accurate-view-of-
students-abilities/

www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationopinion/11678216/Intelligence-cannot-be-defined-by-
exams.html

https://www.noodles.com/articles/why-good-grades-dont-always-match-good-test-scores

https://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar99/vol56/num06/Why-Standardized-
Tests-Don%27t-Measure-Educational-Quality.aspx